Kay

Even now,
I hear their voices in my head, calling me, cajoling, interrogating, telling
the story again and again, as if you could make sense of it.

"Kay, come
here. Look at this."

"Follow
me, Kay. This way. Follow me."

I grew up
next door to David and Michael on the Connecticut River in a valley divided
into small farms. The fields beside the water spread to the hills where
the woods begin. Whately, Hatfield, Sunderland, Deerfield -- as you drive
along the river road, the towns appear. Beside the flat fields a range
of hills rises like the soft, uneven humps of a beaver.

I knew the
river from the time I was little. On a map in my room I traced its blue
course through the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, into western
Massachusetts past the town where I lived. In July the fields that ran
beside it were patterned with flowering squash, pumpkin, tobacco, and
corn, and the sky filled with the high hum of insects, the corn leaves
rich and dark as if you could peel back the skin of the world.

Months later
there would be piles of pumpkin and winter squash, the hills streaked
with red maple and yellow birch, the river water layered with the colored
leaves that folded into the swirls and eddies. Purple pokeberries and
dark red sumac in the old pastures, a small grove of apple trees. I remember
it all -- the hard sweep of snow in the winter, the barn down the road
filled with Holsteins, goldenrod and dried thistles, corn stubble in the
fall, and the sound of geese. There were wild roses in the pastures up
near the trees and grapevines along the fence by the river. The grass
was more than knee high. It scratched my legs as I ran through it, all
the way to the water.

For thirteen
years while I was growing up, I lived next door to David and Michael.
As far back as I can remember, we ran through the fields and pastures
by our houses, playing along the banks of the river. David was a sergeant,
and Michael and I were captives. Or I was a river queen, and David and
Michael were the swordsmen fighting a dragon for the smooth stone that
fit the palm of my hand.

Both of
them had brown hair and the lanky, long-legged build of their father.
Michael's eyes were bright green, the color of the woods, and David's
were nearly black, like those stones we picked up from the bottom of the
river. During the summer we played in the cornfields, running through
the rows of stalks, and when the river was shallow, we waded upstream,
the cold water washing around our ankles.

"Kay, watch."
An arc of water spread high across the air, until we were soaked and mud-covered,
tired enough to lie in the sun and rest.

"When I
grow up, I'm traveling everywhere," David told us, staring at the sky.
"To other countries like Europe and Asia and Africa."

"Those are
continents," Michael commented.

David turned
to me. "You next, Kay. Say what you'll do."

I said I
wanted to grow plants.

"Like farmers?"
Michael asked. "I could do that."

David lay
back again. "Say you could have whatever you wanted," he said, speaking
to the sky.

Michael
quickly answered fishing. No school.

"A plane,"
David told us. "One that could land anywhere, something that would fly
me."

My father
had disappeared before I was born. During their last two years of college,
he and my mother had lived together in a house with other students; then,
the summer after graduating, he decided to drive out to California with
one of his friends. My mother got postcards from Colorado and Arizona,
where he camped in state parks, and a letter that was postmarked Nevada,
all describing the things he had seen and done.

Over the
years mutual friends of theirs would tell us something about him -- he
married at one point, got divorced, he had a job in the music industry,
but my mother had stopped looking for him, and he never contacted us.

A year after
I was born, my mother accepted a graduate fellowship in New York City,
and a few years later she found a teaching position in the art department
at a university in western Massachusetts. When we moved to the valley,
we found an extended family in Jen, Kevin, David, and Michael. Kevin taught
American history at the state university where my mother taught art, and
Jen, who volunteered for an animal-rescue group, took care of me after
school and in the summers while my mother worked. Usually it was just
Michael and David and me playing together, but sometimes we met up with
other kids who lived farther down the road. Jen collected kids the same
way she took in hurt animals -- cats and dogs, foxes, birds of all kinds,
and friends of David or Michael whose parents were going through a divorce
or some other hard time.

From when
we were little, I looked up to David with a kind of awe, partly because
I had no father. In the beginning it was David's father, Kevin, who I
looked to. I can remember him coming home in the evenings, throwing his
books and briefcase down. He would put his arms around Jen, and then he
would scoop up David and Michael in turn, hugging them hard or tossing
them into the air. If I was still there, he lifted me also, tucking me
against him for a moment so that I felt the roughness of his coat against
my face or smelled the scent of coffee.

When I went
home afterward, I'd carry the smell and the touch of him with me. "What
happened at David and Michael's this afternoon? What was Jen doing?" my
mother would ask when I was helping her to make dinner. And when I answered
her, I would describe everything that had happened ...

The foregoing is excerpted from The River Road by Karen Osborn.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without
written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street,
New York, NY 10022

Karen Osborn,
New York Times notable author of Patchwork, returns with a heartrending
drama of love, family, friendship, and the long aftermath of tragedy.

Searing and
unforgettable, The River Road explores the rippling effects of
tragedy on the lives of two families. David and Michael Sanderson are
brothers, inseparable since childhood from each other and from their neighbor,
Kay Richards, who has become a complicated young woman involved in a passionate
and obsessive love affair with David. One spring night, while at home
on a break from college, the threesome embark on a night of adventure
and experimentation, driving recklessly through the forested roads of
the Connecticut Valley. Stopping at the French King Bridge, David -- full
of youthful hubris and hallucinogens -- dares to jump off, mistakenly
believing that he'll be able to swim ashore. With this senseless plunge
into the frigid, swollen river he sets into motion an inexorable chain
of events that indelibly alters the lives of everyone involved: Michael,
who watched from the car; Kay, who stood next to him and helped him climb
onto the rail; and both sets of stunned parents who receive phone calls
on that March night.

Told through
the alternating voices of Kay, Michael, and Davids father, Kevin,
The River Road is a suspenseful narrative of the accusations, murder investigation,
and tense courtroom battle that follows. Closely observed and psychologically
penetrating, it brilliantly captures the individual anguish that is suffered
in the wake of a life-shattering event, while also giving testament to
the ways of survival and the endurance of love.

Karen
Osborn grew up on Grand Island, New York, where she lived in a rural
area along the banks of the Niagara River. She graduated from Hollins
College, an all-women's college in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
and went to graduate school in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Since then she
has lived in both the southeast and New England and has taught literature
and creative writing at several colleges and universities. She is an Award-winning
poet and the author of two previous novels, Patchwork, a New York
Times Notable Book of the Year, and Between Earth and Sky. She
lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.